Right Relationship

..and of course, what I totally forgot to say last week, in expounding the virtues of plant medicines, was that it's always important to ask the plant.

Here's Stephan Beyer and Christina Pratt reminding us of why it is important for us as humans to be in right relationship with the world in general and the plants as allies specifically.

One picture which Dr Beyer painted, of healing plants being administered only in hospital settings by authorised medical personnel, was particularly chilling. Is this what we want? And what is it the plants want?

Rather than grasping at possible miracle cures, I suggest that we all take the time to alter our worldview.

Get out there. Sit with the plant, or the spirit of the plant. Ask it what it desires of us. Enough of this casual, anthropocentric disrespecting of other corporeal and non corporeal life forms already. It's a contributing factor in the wetiko disease, after all.

Le Bois Sacre

A friend of mine is celebrating six years of sobriety tomorrow.

I have no idea if she attends AA meetings, but for myself - and I suspect for many an addict -they just never did work sufficiently to put me in that place where I could achieve consistent freedom from alcohol.

Today I'm looking back down 14 years of continuous, wonderful, almost unbelievable lack of dependence on either alcohol or tranquilisers. I still sometimes dream of how it was, and I wake up terrified. Lest I forget.

I was quite surprised this week to find myself watching an episode of Law & Order - Special Victims Unit. Surprised to be watching the gods-damned telly, for sure (especially a series dedicated to murder porn in which the victims are nearly always women), but more surprised to find that the episode contained a strong endorsement for Ibogaine as a substance-abuse treatment.

Iboga - used by the Bwiti and NeoBwiti people of West Africa for ages as an initiatory drug - is found chiefly in the roots of 3 plants, 2 of which(Tabernanthe Iboga and Voacanga Africana) are found only in Africa, while the third (Tabernaemontana) flourishes as far afield as Australia.

It is quite usual for a heroin addict to break her dependency on opiates after a single-dose treatment of Ibogaine; something almost unheard of in drug rehabilitation. No scary and life-threatening withdrawals either.

This plant ally seems to work by kicking the addict gently out of her well-worn groove of substance abuse. It confers a heightened ability for introverted insight, the process sounding a little like a near death experience. Or a Shamanic Dismemberment, which I understand is its usual application in Africa.

So, all the nations of the world have picked up on this wonderful medicine and are using it to break the chains of heroin dependence throughout their lands, no?

No, of course not. In the US, Australia,Sweden,Denmark, Poland, Belgium, France and Switzerland it is a schedule I drug, tightly controlled, and even growing the plants turns one into a criminal automatically. Notice that those countries are among those with the highest level of tragedy concerning Heroin abuse.

I see that we apparently boast an Iboga treatment centre in the Western Cape in this country, though. I wonder if it's still a going concern? That would be something  - for all our violence and extreme forms of patriarchal woman abuse - of which we could be very proud.

Pic: le bois sacre, or Tabernanthe Iboga, courtesy of the vaults at Erowid

Just As Well

Alcoholism runs rampant in my family.

My maternal grandfather died from it. My dad's sister had it - which implies a paternal great-grandparent, as the disease often seems to miss a generation.

My brother is free of it, and my son. My brother's children are still very young, but I'm betting the bug won't show up in them.

Among all my generation, which means all my cousins, maternal and paternal, I seem to be the only sufferer.

But this scourge goes a long way back, deep in the passage of my lineage, for I have sat with my ancestors and I know that all those generations of people suffering with alcoholism comes to a point with me.

I'm on the leading edge of this family - out here on the limb, watching those before me being deeply wounded by the disease and seeing those around me just as deeply gored by living close to an alcoholic.

It's a nasty, nasty illness but it's not simple either in diagnosis or treatment. While I have been sober and healing these 14 years, it has become increasingly obvious that I have to be the family curandero in this matter.

For the centuries it has passed through my antecedents, no-one has done this work: the work of taking on the ancestral disease and stopping it.

And by healing and stopping it, I mean to apply the brakes in both temporal directions, so that my work in spirit here and now oscillates forward and backward in time.It means delving through whirlpools of unheeded and unhealed grief, some of it generations old. And some of it, if I cannot do this work properly, generations in the future.

Sometimes the work of this god makes me cry. But there is literally no-one else to do it, so I take it on: each day, month,year I sit in communion with the orishas, understanding what has happened here and learning always from the pain as well as the joy. I am at the point of the generational arrow and if I didn't do it, I could not look myself in the eye.

I suppose it's just as well that I am the family shaman, then.

Pic: from Pagan Culture

Diameter Of A Proton

Once upon a time, we thought that the Universe worked like a clockwork mechanism.

This was thousands of years after we had mostly given up the belief that the Universe ran on Spirit, and a couple of centuries before we started to lose our absolute conviction that we know how the Universe runs at all - which is the place we are now, of course.

In the arena of 20th Century Physics, there was an eerie uniformity of theory. What we were taught in school and university was what the best minds believed, and all the best minds, to a large extent, agreed with one another. I was taught Physics in an era of monolithic theory. Never mind that Quantum Mechanics had been studied for decades - all the Best Minds agreed on how to understand it, and that was via the Copenhagen Interpretation. The few outlier theories, while acknowledged, had no real grip on the community of physicists and were used for illustrative comparison, not serious consideration.

It's only in the last couple of decades - and I, alas, have not been a practising Physicist for that long - that fundamental theories of many differing hues have been seriously and continuously held by more than a few scientists. The strength of the minds holding divergent views has  become much greater. And so things like this have started happening.

The diameter of the Proton may not, I admit, be  a thrilling concern for most people in the world today. But the huge disparities between measurements (yes, in the sub atomic world 4% is a huge disparity) is a clear testimony that many great minds are lined up, not only on opposite sides of this question, but on many different sides. And that's something we haven't seen for a good couple of centuries at least.

And so, just as in Copernicus' time, the fabric of our understanding of the Cosmos appears to be wavering.
There is no longer one dominant mode of thought on the nature of reality, even -or especially - at the level of Theoretical Physics. Shifting, sliding and melting in many colours and possibly infinite dimensions. Because as humans, what we think and strongly believe does have the power to shake the foundations of the World. And we are starting to see that in action.

What will we do with this awareness of Our awesome power?

This train of thought brought on by Christina's latest podcast on Complementary Dualism. Many thanks Christina.

No Vision

In the midst of the heat, the skin on my legs and feet shiny and tight,itching as though a new dermis layer were growing there, Christina sounded as if she was talking directly to me.

She often manages that - to sound as if she'd been eavesdropping on my life these past couple of weeks. It's quite a gift.

Two weeks after turning and walking away from the corporate chains which had become unbearable, my vision of the future is still out of focus. But that's how it's meant to be. The Ancestors at my back, supportive: after turning around to face them and do what I could to heal the lineage, they are in their proper place, behind me.

The Eastern altar with its single oil burner and black mirror beckons me. To light the candle under frankincense and myrrh, sit and stare without concentration into its smooth dark surface....

I am no longer in freefall, and have no need of a safety net. I can get there on my own two feet, at a reasonable walking pace.Wherever that is, I shall be happy to be going there, being who I alone in this world am, and becoming who I alone came here to be.

Pic: looking North, path between ritual area and the dogs; scratch patch. Sun in my left hand, Moon in my right.

From The Centre

Speak from the Centre and always truly from the Centre.
Say that which is un-sayable in the words of men, say it as you speak from the centre of your being.

You'll know when this happens, for - not leaning left or right, not tending forward or back nor above or below - your essence will radiate from the point where it lies concentrated in the meat body.

Of course, speaking from the centre involves getting there first and recognising where you are.
It's a place and an experience which I cannot in all truth English on this blog. But that's OK.
For I am neither teacher nor bodhisattva to guide others to their core.

What I am is a reporter, in common with thousands of souls both like and unlike me.

And the view from the centre, while it can be reported on, cannot be described in any way that would make any...err...sense.

So I would urge us all to seek this place out. And sit awhile, with folded hands and quiet heart, if only to be able to say I've been there.

Namaste.

Made Of Language

"The world" opined Terence McKenna "is made of language"

Perhaps. For human animals, anyway.

I doubt very much that this is true for non-human animals - which still,despite our best efforts, outnumber us - or for insects, fish, or any of the plant kingdom.

In fact, plants are stunning examples of Beings who can use language, after a fashion, to communicate with human animals, but whose world does not seem to be constructed of language.

Our ancient allies seem to have a survival strategy which includes getting humans to nurture, propagate and protect their species- while they benefit us in numerous ways. Food, aesthetics, medicine and psychedelic states of mind are some of the benefits chlorophyll based life bestows on humanity.

Is this a symbiotic relationship? Do we even acknowledge it?
And I haven't even mentioned the non-chlorophyll-based vegetables, the mushrooms.

Back to humans. It seems to be in the way we have grown culture around us like a shell - or is culture an artifact of language? - as from the first few words we utter we're encouraged to name things, relate those named things with other named things, and ourselves with the named things. Forgetting, I suppose, that we haven't named or related ourselves to our selves at all, yet.

That continuous background chatter which is always with us in normal waking consciousness, and which we strive to still in meditative states, that's construction going on, right there, all the time. Humming away like demented muzac in the elevator.

Hel, i don't know about you, but I certainly even dream in language.
When other Beings want to communicate with me in dreams, they have to use symbols and images, which are both direct products of language. Sometimes they throw up actual words on the screen of the dream for me to read.
It's quite bad, really, this dependence on language for our reality, and it's hard work for non-human Beings.

What would the world look like without being constructed of words?
This is the province of the shaman. And I'm sorry, Terence, but you didn't really go there too well. Apart from the mushrooms talking to you and the Machine Elves, that is.

Part of the Shaman's work involves becoming the Other - and often, that's a non-human Other.

In deep meditation or Shamanic Journeying we get a taste of what the world looks like when the mind is cut free from the bindings of language. Then we're really starting to cook with gas.
The problem is - and it's something I've run into several times on this blog - we can't perform the other part of the Shaman's work -  bringing the tales back to our community - without using some form of language. Snookered again.

The only way I can see around this is to go there - do the journey, do the meditation - establish that it is indeed possible, come back and bring the information that the human mind can be shipped free from its moorings. And say: Now, go you and do likewise.





Pic: Found here

My Roots Are A Network

I've looked at Chiron before on this blog. Then, as now, the looking was personal. I doubt if there's any other way to take this little, recently discovered yet powerful astrological marker.

For Chiron, wherever it falls in our Natal Chart, points out the nature of our early wounds: and that's ego-level personal.

So I'm going to talk about myself again, mostly. Hel, this is my blog.

I have a Fourth House Chiron - indicating an insecure childhood. Wasn't it just, though?
Not that my parents were neglectful nurturers. They both did everything in their power, I believe, to bring up their children with love and positive affirmations.

But they both had wandering souls. If it had been just the two of them, I guess they would've tramped around the world their entire lives. As it was, my brother and I got dragged off to live in various countries every few years.

We got to see how the world outside of family lived, and I'm grateful for that. But rootedness was, and to some degree still is, pretty alien to my nature by dint of this constant restlessness.

Add to that the sign of my Natal Chiron is Aquarius ( and the Sign overrides the House in most cases) and, as I've mentioned, conjunct my Natal Moon, and you have one unconventionally insecure little girl in the making.

Who became one unconventionally insecure adult.I have always stood out, in other words, both within and without, and have been fairly uncomfortable with it.

But nothing is all bad news. In fact, the bad news is the good news, when viewed from a sufficiently zoomed-out perspective.

I took as my own the name of the Eagle over a quarter of a century ago. Today I work closely with another bird. Zoomed out is what I'm all about. And despite my love for the local landbase - the reciprocated love I treasure - I know deep within that all the world is indeed my home. My roots are a network, touching ground across the globe. I am at home anywhere and everywhere. Despite my slowly decreasing distrust of most human people, the geography and the non-human life feels comfortable to me all over the world.

This unconventional insecurity has blessed my life in a number of ways.
I have less difficulty than most making non-obvious connections, and I see the bigger picture more often and sooner than most around me. Indra's Net is not just a metaphor to me - I feel it everywhere, all the time.

I can see the outlines and the detail of a program before I even start coding it - something I was not aware was all that unusual.So it makes me a good programmer.I can say Fuck The Police loud and clear, and still have empathy for the benighted souls whose lot it is to be one.So it makes me a good Anarchist.

My partner has a Fifth House Chiron, indicating early restrictions on his soul. And it is in Pisces, pointing to a deep ability to heal, which I can recognise but which he seems reluctant to acknowledge.

All this is a pearl of great price.

But the pain inherent in realising it? Priceless, also.

Pic: Original oil painting Chiron in Aquarius, Kiss The Sky Studio

No Code Needed

Well, this is interesting.

Rich Terrile has put forward a theory which says that the entire Universe is code running on some extra-universal programmer's computer:

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

On one level, it seems to be riffing off the world-as-Maya principle.;it's all illusion.

I don't have a big hairy problem with that idea.

The difference between the ancient Buddhist insight and Terrile's proposal lies in who is generating that illusion.

For on another level, this appears to me to be the cyber-age's version of the clockwork universe theorem beloved of industrial western civilisation and Richard Dawkins. It's all ultimately understandable, you see, and moreover it's amenable to our dissection and analysis - if only we keep probing Nature for Her secrets, we will uncover them eventually.

That must be very appealing to the scientific worldview. A great program, rather than a clockwork mechanism, about which we can learn all there is to know if we just keep going.
Nope, nothing ineffable here.

I stepped out onto the balcony. Urban birds were squabbling noisily in the background. Or were they running code loops? And was I?

 The huge bloody cellphone mast rose white against the blue sky.

A sudden flash of red against the blue, the white made me look up: a Red Winged Starling had taken flight from the mast, displaying the colour of blood. Showing me the vividness of life even within the would-be sterile city.

In that moment, I knew that although I can never prove it, this Universe is not a stored procedure in some cosmic simulation.; that Life contains it's own willfulness, its own bloody-mindedness, and its own inexplicable beauty.

And that those elements often interact with my own sense of Being in a way not explicable by appeal to some external code hacker.

It's the one  thing I do know, although how I know it I don't have a clue: that we all, from granite hillside rock to salmonella enterica to birch to starling have conscious being that is not pre programmed. And that it is We All who are responsible for our lives, both separately and collectively, both creating and destroying, both Being and passing out of Being.World without end. No code needed.

It Is Not..

It's not that your sky is such a clear and tender blue, out here in the midst of Winter.

 Nor that your plant people glow that particular green in the westering Sunday sun.

 Neither is it the way my earthsoul surfaces from sleep to greet these perfect images.

It is just the fact that, for at least four billion years, I have been privileged to be able to see these things. And try to speak of them. And make attempts to capture them in pixels when I can't capture them in words.

 And, when I can do none of these things, to simply breathe in worship.

Though You Have Considered All The Facts

I could not, in a million years, have said it better than Sister Hecate does:

My religion doesn’t shy away from death, from the sacrifices that happen every moment, of every day, in Nature. My religion participates, equally, in the death of the robin and in the satisfaction of the fox, feeding her kits. My religion knows that corn cries out when it is picked and that the sow morns for her slaughtered piglets, just as I rejoice in seeing G/Son well-fed. My religion frightens some people because it does not shy away from what we call “the dark.” I want to be as fully present to the robin, who dies, as I will die, as I am to the fox, who eats, as I do eat.

And also, with Wendell Berry, remember to

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Always.

Pic: From the SquirrelBasket

Maybe I'm Mistaken

Maybe I'm mistaken expecting you to fight
Or maybe I'm just crazy, I don't know wrong from right
But while I am still living, I've just got this to say
It's always up to you if you want to be that
want to see that
want to see that way
- you're coming along!

Having just finished a two-day Death Walk, I'm feeling a little crazy around the edges.
The physical and spiritual preparation, the calling out to the newly-dead soul, the ascertaining that this Walk is truly necessary;the careful protection of my own ego, astral body and the prepping of the journey's companions: it all takes a little edge off a person's vitality, if only temporarily. If I was going to come down with a virus, I mean, this would be the microbial opportunity of a lifetime.

(Just in passing, this is the first time I've ever actually "met" a soul with a Crocodile for a spirit helper - interesting. )

So I was a bit frazzled last night - sitting in the lounge long after my usual bedtime, glaring at the wires festooning the place and wishing I was living in an organic hut someplace- when this final stanza from an old Supertramp album, The Crime of the Century, blasted itself into my consciousness, full crescendo piano and guitar, crashed through various layers of my recuperating self, and passed, leaving in its wake a feeling of incredible focus.

It is so tragically easy to be ensnared in the web of Stuff. You think you need this thing...and then someone suggests you might need that thing as well...and if you are bought in to the over culture of this time and place, it may never end. Eventually, all "your" Stuff traps you, weighs your spirit down, and it becomes a struggle to free yourself from its snares.
Those of us who have suffered the Stroke of material liberation will know just how needful it is to be Earth-plane light, unencumbered as much as possible by Stuff which, while momentarily distracting,becomes a lead weight for Self.
We don't have to drag it all around. It is not "yours" in any case. It belongs to the Culture, and as such has as its primary agenda the immobilisation of your godSelf.

This is an important first step for anyone wishing to see the human race survive on this planet beyond the next fifty years or so - divest yourself of all the Stuff. Throw off those shackles now, turn in a full circle and see who has real meaning for you. You will find that there are beings in your life who are your eternal companions - animal, vegetable and mineral as well as spiritual - who can hardly see or hear you past all the clutter you have imprisoned your soul in.

Or,
Maybe I'm mistaken, expecting you to fight...

The Whole Earth Will Capture Me

Jupiter has just entered Gemini, my eighth house, joining the general festivities which have been ongoing there this month.
But somehow my outlook has changed from mild exasperation to full-blown to hell with it, which in me comes across as offensively trivial, to some folks.
This is not a problem - in fact, I can't see very many problems at all, speaking purely for myself.
So, you know, just excuse me if I suddenly become offensive to you.

Last night, I fell into some deeply liminal spaces. Many of my worst transgressions of the past rose up and made an earnest effort at haunting me. In real emotional pain, I found myself being held, enrapt, by the very ground and all the plant and microbial life within and upon it. Safely snuggled by the landbase, I fell asleep with the vivid image of a Tiger straining out of the background towards me. I felt no fear - big cats represent my shadow self, and almost invariably appear when I'm about to take a leap into the Dark.
This particular dark crossing has much to do with my discriminating, at last, among my Ancestors, and deciding who among them is truly a helpful spirit and who is not.

Three nights ago I dreamed that I was having to apologise to my Mom for forgetting to call her on my mobile. She was waiting for me, however, and I was gutted with guilt.
The next night I dreamt that I was desperately trying to call her, and having great trouble with the connection. Waking, I apologised again.

The evening after that, our local Spar supermarket was robbed at gunpoint by seven men driving a security vehicle. The manager was shot and later died in hospital, while one of the shop's security guards was shot in the head but survived.
And I - wading deeper into the edges of the alam al mythal - have been plagued by the daimon of an elderly woman who is connected to the dead man in some way. It looks like a Death Walk is on the cards this New Moon, for me.

It is cold and dry in Joburg, and Sunday's great winds have shaken the dead leaves right off the trees. And with this howling ice cold air I sink deeper, almost to the point of forgetting my living human connections at times. The dimension of Wyrd is compelling at this time of year, as if with every swirling brown and wrinkled leaf I am shedding another layer of  enculturated ego. Falling backwards, arms outstretched, knowing the whole Earth is there to capture me.

The Ego Mask of God

You cannot, as Christina emphasises, always tell at first contact who in your lineage is an ancestral helping spirit and who is an ancestral leech.

It's a mistake I have made more than once, but by paying close attention to what is actually communicated via the ancestral line you can often sort out the wheat from the chaff.

And that chaff can be dangerous to you personally. Ancestors who have not lived well and not died well can pretty safely be assumed to not be among those who can help and guide you ...as I have found to my own dismay.

You see, when we die, something akin to the shattering of a glass vase takes place: the ego-mask which has obscured the God Self throughout the earthly life breaks into a million billion pieces in the act of freeing the true Self. Most of those pieces will never be found upon this plane or the next one ever again - but some of them are held fast in the memories and clinging of relatives and friends wanting to keep the beloved dead's memory alive. And it is often one or more of these pieces which come to us in the guise of an ancestor, seeking the rest of its earthly ego, wanting to be put together again through the livings' act of recognition.
We shouldn't acquiesce to these hungry ghosts' attempts to use our consciousness for their own undivine , semi-conscious ends. It does no-one any good - neither the seeking ego fragment nor the conned shamanic practitioner. Conditions ranging from soul discomfort to active possession have been known to be the result of taking on such a mote of shattered ego.

It's not an easy task, discerning the true ancestral guiding or helping spirits from among the array of partial memory-lives we are presented with upon looking into our ancestral neural network, but it must be done to preserve our own sanity and the cleanest working of the real ancestors who wish only to help us here. I see many signs of false ancestor connection around me in this country - such questionable practises as live bull slaughter and incestuous marriages can really only come from those ego pieces masquerading as ancestors - and I see, too, how easy it is to fall prey to the undead blandishments.

Maybe if we lived in such a way as to be aware always of our own true natures, and of the ego as a filter or a mask on this Being which lasts only so long as breath and life reside in the body and mind, maybe then we would be far more likely to die a good death, cleaning out all the mask fragments and dissolving them so as not to leave our litter lying around for our descendants to trip over.

Pic: photo by egoanianqueets

Pretty Full Weekend

Three days to the thinning of the Veil which is Samhain, Southern Hemisphere time, and the Invitation has been sent.

It is sent continuously from the preceding New Moon, of course.

This year, an image has been forming insistently in my mind whenever I'm sitting at the Ancestor altar:

A line of light runs from me to my two most recent Ancestors, and that forms the image into two halves, at first. Mother side and Father side.
From each of those closest Ancestors run two light lines to their parents (one of whom from each side is sitting in the close-Ancestor-cluster I work with daily), and from each of those, two further parental lines.
And so on.
It fills up at first like a divided brain, in two distinct halves.
But then something interesting starts happening.
Tendrils of light connections cross the Mother-Father divide going both ways - this represents Ancestors who are antecedent on both sides. As will happen of course, if you go back far enough. Small clumps of intensity form, indicating greater or lesser spheres of inbreeding.
Eventually, it resolves itself as looking very like the human brain's neural network.

 Which is not surprising, I suppose. There are functions which govern associations such as these. Like the brain, and like dear Facebook ,or like a country club.Modelled in Maths - yet I was still surprised to see it forming so perfectly in my mind.

The Invitation, as usual, calls all Ancestors who lived well and died well, and those who wish me no harm, to the feast communication night of Samhain, which this year falls on a pretty much full moon, and also the rites of Hecate's Fires on the Taurus-Scorpio Sun-Moon axis this year.

Going to be a pretty full weekend, then.

Brain Neural Network Pic: Scientific American

Not Appropriate

Yesterday's news:
6 people, 2 goats killed in crash

"The taxi rolled and four patients were found about 17 metres away from where the taxi was," said spokesperson Synock Matobako. One of the injured said the passengers in the taxi were sangomas on their way to a ritual in Zandspruit. Matobako said two goats and a chicken were also inside the taxi. The goats were killed in the accident "

Last Saturday morning, we were woken to the sound of very loud drums- apparently constructed from dustbins- penny whistles and chants. No problem - a cleansing ceremony going on at one of my neighbours' houses.

The repeat performance on Saturday evening was also OK with us, although both Warren and I were starting to get a bit headach-y and testy.

Sunday morning however, crossed the line.
I know we're early risers, but most people in this suburb are not.
The din was truly incredible.
Warren got out the petrol-engined lawnmower and I got out my mortar and pestle.

Dragons Blood, Rue, Tonka Bean and Hyssop. A truly moving mixture when pounded into a fine powder, sprinkled on glowing coals and swung over the back fence.

You know,our Ancestors are not bloody deaf - far from it.

Just don't piss the Shaman off. We have limits, too.

Ask A Shaman

Playing along with the Mercury retrograde at its peak, we have experienced a fallen-over database table, a fallen over data warehouse and a fallen over risk management system. And that's just at work.
At home, just ask Warren about the fallen-over horse racing comms systems. This morning, in a last-gasp mirroring, we had a suburb-wide power failure at 3 am.
We'll be finished with this nonsense by tomorrow mostly - just a few electronic ghosts popping up over the next week to remind us - and I can go forward once more. Hopefully.

But that's not what I wanted to mention this morning. This article tells us that, in the cities, Sparrows alter their dialect. In common with most humans, dogs and plants, they speak in a different tone and with subtly altered vocabulary to the way they communicate in the countryside.
Well, as the saying goes, duh.

I realise that many of us humans like to have stuff proven by scientific methods. It seems to be a part of our makeup, or maybe just a large part of our enculturation, that we need backup to our knowledge.
But, really. we could have saved the time and money we spent on that little project and put it towards, for instance, female education in Africa.
We could, in other words, wanting confirmation of this deeply-known fact, just have asked a Shaman.

Boudicea

I had a dream last night which, it seems to me, delved into both the highly personal and the more specific.

It left me shaking but at the same time, relieved. Some light had been thrown onto my own history, as well as some of Our history as a primate growing into consciousness.

The dream went like this:

I lived in a house on a street. It was a small house, but big enough for my needs, and the needs of my family who lived with me. There was a garden out front, neighbours across the street, and dogs running around between yard and house. I loved that house in which I lived with my family. There were also maids in the kitchen, and in the front room, two aquaria containing tropical fish, which I kept forgetting to feed – still, those fish thrived.

One day, my father came home from the hospital where he had been for a long time. Almost immediately, he set about putting up Christmas trees by the front fence. A neighbour’s boy came to remove them, but I argued with him-although those trees, with their Christian iconography, made me angry. Nevertheless, the trees were removed. My father started talking about selling the house. I made no immediate answer, as the family were setting out to go to work and we all climbed into the car. My Mom drove us, but I suddenly remembered that I had left my lunch tin back at the house. I got out of the car, expecting it to wait for me, but it drove away.

I returned to the house, realising that I would have to take a day off work now – my Mom had abandoned me, and so had the rest of my family. I lay down for a sleep, while the maids worked cheerfully on in the kitchen. When I awoke, my family were back, and I remembered my Dad’s talk of selling the house. I flew into a rage at him, even as I noted that he was fully twice my size. It came over me at that point, for the first time, that I was the legal owner of this house. That I was paying for it on a regular basis, and that when I had finished paying, it would be wholly mine. Not my father’s, or my brother’s, or my mother’s, who had apparently abandoned me. Mine.

The enraged Terri was also the suddenly enlightened Terri. The one who realised, at last, that there are things in this incarnation for which you take ownership. And also that there was aid all around me –from the maids in the kitchen to the free-roaming canines to the neglected fish in the aquaria – which I had totally failed to recognise.

I awoke with the ownership of my house resounding in my heart, and felt a direct link to my shamanic dismemberment, the start of my awakening in this dream of life.

The tale is told, then, of parts of my personal journey – yet also, I started to see, parts of Our journey as embodied beings at the same time. I was filled with wonder.

As the saying goes, she who can receive it, let her then receive it.

Pic: Queen Boudicca by John Oupie

Change of Helping Spirits

Christina always has something interesting to say.
Last week, her podcast on the Shaman Sickness contained much good sense, as usual.

..I might add here that Christina was also the recipient of a Western Scientific education, which she uses as another lens through which to view the world, but she doesn't rely on it exclusively.Which is a lesson I fear the simplistic materialists could learn. But I digress..

The subject of ones initiatory helping spirit is a fascinating one to me, especially now as I seem to be in helping spirit transition.

To be a bit clearer, I have considered the Pied Crow to be my primary helping spirit for some years now, with the Panther as Shadow helper. Before that time, I was connected to Eagle.This appears to be changing again, with the advent of Owl into my personal space last weekend.

On Sunday I took a half hour's meditation, and when I came back to this space, Owl was perched on the roof just above my altar. Now, when I try to visualise my upper level helping spirit, the form of Owl is what I get. Those huge yellow eyes..

Ah, but the more things change, the more I'm in ecstasy. Interesting that my primary upper totem is now transitioning into a nocturnal bird. I can see the paralells with a new phase of my shamanic apprenticeship: one which flows deeper into the cthonic consciousness which springs directly from the Field. I hope that I have the courage to mantain.

Pic: I actually found it here, although I doubt that it originates there.

The Core Of The Healing Of It

I'm heating Myrrh and Geranium in the burner as I sit down at the altar and stretch my soul out to connect with my Ancestors.

The combination is strange: the rich depth of Myrrh contrasting oddly with the sharp, sour invigoration of the Geranium. Spiritual depth and courage in this combination of scents - just what I really, really need right now.

I feel Pied Crow settle into my God-Soul while Black Panther rises from the Earth, insinuating himself along the sushumna. And I reach out my hands, and find them taken, on both sides, by female antecedents. Mom and Granny Banning, welcome. The space behind the oil burner is gradually being filled in now by the shape of a man - hair oiled and swept back off a slightly receding forehead, he's all shades of iron-grey. My Grandfather Banning is not someone I have any conscious memories of  - only that indelible memory of my mother, sitting crying by the phone one day in New Jersey. That memory which has never left me, like the recall of a head-on blow to the Spirit. Her father had died, and I, being too young to really understand,nevertheless gathered that here was something noteworthy, something of subtle and gross meaning, of undertones and grief-laden overtones. My Mom, who was the solid foundation of our emotional lives, was battered by sorrow and guilt and many other emotions which flew straight over my 5-year-old head at the time.

I have him take the Spirit-hands of my Mom and Granny - his daughter and his wife - and we sit like that, in circle together, for some time, me breathing slowly and deeply, directing the energy around my bodies, and grounding - oh, so desperately grounding - as I open my Self a tiny bit for these three graces.

The disease of alcoholism has run strongly through my family - and in particular, through my Maternal family, to the point where it has become the unhidden secret, hardly talked about but felt to the core of every member. Where does it come from? From which well of fears and misalignment rose this terrifying spectre, which still haunts my dreams every so often with visions of glass bottles half-full of clear, stinking liquid, and a heaviness of dread when I awake?

I'm making a little progress in trying to fathom my distaff kin. For, unlike my paternal family, who appeared in this land as members of the conquering race, these people of my Mother had no land to call their own for three, four,maybe five or more generations.
Foundering on an island to which no member of the population was native, they put on the culture and appearance of the gentry, which may have been a deception right from the start. They moved then to this land, where they once again faced a lack of rootedness - a lack of the presence of their own Ancestral Spirits all around them, which seems to be important to humans. For rare - although increasing in frequency - is the person whose mind can accept and encompass that the entire Earth is our home and mother - and beyond that, that we are truly at home in the Universe, and it is Us as We Are It. In my great-grandparent's generation,that state of mind was uncommon and unacknowledged.

I'm looking at an entire side of a Family Tree whose branches do not apparently connect directly to any roots; whose leaves are fluttering unanchored in the breeze of Culture. This sickness, I think, has its origins right here - in a lack of origin.
This is just a start,mind you. I'm putting my feet upon that path which should, if I am mindful and careful enough, and if I have a depth of empathy and understanding which will overcome ancient fears and hatreds, lead me to the wellspring of the illness itself - and thence, without a doubt, to the core of the healing of it.

Pic: Francis Plain, St Helena. Doris Francis George, do you remember this?